At Loose Ends

From Candypedia
At Loose Ends
Chapter69 of 129 (list of chapters)
PublishedJanuary 2, 2012 (2012-01-02)
Page count48
Major charactersAbbey, Janet, Daisy, Molly, Charlotte, Abraham
Minor charactersTess, Paulo, Mike, Sue, Jasmine, David, Amaya, Stacy, Kevin, Teddy
LocationsAbbey’s house, Tess’s house, Daisy’s house, Abbey’s old house, Hospital
Collected inVolume Three, Omnibus 1
Chapter navigation
← DecemberAdult Supervision →
Read chapter

While the rest of the gang celebrates at Tess’s Christmas party, Abbey wants only one gift: to find the mother he hasn’t seen since he was small. Janet does the finding, and what she finds is nothing anybody was hoping for.

Synopsis

Christmas is coming, and Molly is tying a ribbon on yet another little present for the mother she and Abbey haven’t seen since they were small.[1] There’s a whole basketful by now, because “when we see her again, she’ll know I didn’t forget about her.”[2] Abbey can’t take it anymore. He tells Janet he’s skipping Tess’s Christmas party to bus back to their old hometown and search for his mother himself.[3] Janet quashes the plan and admits she has no idea what became of Charlotte either. She takes on the search herself.[4]

Abbey goes to the party after all. Inside, Mike is on top of the world: he’s got a ticket to see Sandy at a fashion show the next day.[5] That news stings Daisy, whose childhood best friend Sandy never said a word about coming.[6]

Janet turns up at the party before the night is out, with news she won’t share in front of the others, and Abbey slips out with barely a word to Daisy.[7][8] Sleepless afterward, he relives the night the family broke apart, when Molly found their mother unconscious on the floor.[9] Young Abbey chased his father down at his mistress’s house and blocked Abraham’s car door with his small body until the police arrived.[10] As he was led away in handcuffs, Abraham leaned down to his son: “But now you’ve done it. You’ve ruined this family.”[11]

The next morning, Janet drives Abbey the few hours out of town, and Daisy has asked to come along.[12] Their praise of how tough and righteous he is makes him slump.[13] He remembers the time he slammed a bully into a fence for hitting Molly. Instead of thanking him, she stomped her feet and shouted “Don’t be like Daddy!”[14] He grabbed her and screamed that he wasn’t, and it was his mother’s terrified face he saw staring back.[15]

The drive ends at a snowbound cemetery. Abbey insists it’s just a pit stop, right up until he’s standing among the gravestones.[16] Janet explains at the headstone that Charlotte chose to simply disappear rather than trouble her children.[17] In a hospital flashback, Charlotte begs the nurse before her operation never to tell the kids if anything goes wrong, because “they’ve got a chance to grow up in a normal family.”[18] Abbey breaks down against the headstone, blaming himself for not stopping his father, and a crying Daisy hugs him from behind.[19] The ride home passes in silence, with Daisy leaning over from the back seat to hold him.[20]

Back home, Molly runs up wanting to know whether they found her. Abbey answers only “Yes,” and she takes it with a brave little smile and a wordless hug.[21] That night, he tells Janet that she and Kevin have given them the normal life his mother wanted.[22] On the last page, Molly’s basket of little presents sits alone beside Charlotte’s headstone in the snow.[23]

Character dynamics

Young Abbey blocks his father's car door with his arms outstretched, saying "I.. I'm not scared of you."
Young Abbey stands between his father and the getaway car.
  • Abbey and Charlotte: Abbey has spent years remembering Christmas after Christmas at the window, waiting for a mother who never came.[24] Charlotte died after surgery long ago, having chosen to vanish so her children could grow up in a “normal family.”[18] At her grave, Abbey has a guilt-stricken breakdown. By the last pages, he reaches a first, fragile acceptance that her silence was a gift.[19][22]
  • Abbey and Daisy: They’ve been a couple since New Beginnings,[25] but Abbey’s instinct is still to keep Daisy away from anything touching his family. He turns down her party invitation with a story about errands, and won’t tell her why he leaves early.[26][8] Daisy has known the broad shape of his past since the carnival in Love My Way,[27] but this is the first time she’s actually beside him for it. She asks Janet to bring her along, holds him while he sobs at the grave, and on the ride home he rests his head against hers.[12][19][20]
  • Abbey and Janet: Four years into fostering him,[28] Janet is the steady adult in Abbey’s corner. She blocks his reckless plan, does the searching herself, and keeps telling him the guilt he carries isn’t his.[4][29] By the end, Abbey credits her and Kevin outright with the normal life his mother wanted for him, and lets her kiss him goodnight.[22]
  • Abbey and Molly: A protective older brother and a little sister who copes in her own way. He can’t bear her tradition of making presents for a mother who never comes, and she keeps making them anyway.[2] When he comes home with his one-word answer, she meets it with a brave smile and a hug instead of tears.[21] Whether Molly truly understands is never spelled out, but her basket ends up at the headstone all the same.[23]
  • Daisy and Sandy: Old best friends who haven’t been part of each other’s lives in years, which turns out to still sting. Learning that Sandy is flying in for Mike without a word to her leaves Daisy hurt: “She.. meant a lot to me.”[6]

Trivia & observations

In the dark car, Daisy leans over from the back seat to hug Abbey, who rests his head against hers.
The quiet ride home.
  • Paulo, in a Santa suit, ambushes Abbey with snowballs outside the party, yelling “Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal!” from the fake gangster movie in Home Alone.[30]
  • The song Janet belts along to in the car is Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape.”[15]
  • Per Oliver’s commentary under page 15, the page was ready a week early but held up when the authors’ house was broken into and the upload computer stolen. He now keeps his iMac “chained to a radiator.”[5]
  • Per the commentary on page 9, the chapter was originally plotted around Abbey and Daisy taking a bus out of town with hotel money. There was even a comedy scene where each refuses the room’s single bed and both end up sleeping on the floor. The idea was scrapped as unrealistic, and Janet’s research took its place.[31]
  • Abbey’s eyes are drawn differently depending on how angry he is. Veronica’s commentary calls it a deliberate callback to his rescue of Tess from Noah in Under Pressure.[32][33]
  • Abraham addresses his son as “Abraham” during the arrest. Abbey has mentioned before that he was named after his father.[11][34]
  • Veronica calls this chapter “very personal” in her commentary. Like Abbey, she experiences involuntary flashbacks triggered by small sensations, and she wrote his from that experience.[35]

Related chapters

  • New Beginnings: The confrontation young Abbey runs in on was first shown there, with Abraham telling his mistress to pack everything because “Charlotte knows. It’s over.”[36] Abbey relives that same day from his side of it here. New Beginnings is also where he and Daisy first got together.
  • Love My Way: At the carnival there, Augustus taunted Abbey as “Abraham” of a bloodline “well-known for careful control of their tempers” and pushed him to a breakdown.[37] That was the first time Daisy heard anything about his family. This time, she’s beside him as he confronts the rest.
  • December: Mike told Lucy “I hate you, Lucy” just days before this party,[38] which is why she is nowhere to be seen at Tess’s and why Sue corners Mike with “Did you have anything to do with this?”[39]

References

  1. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 2
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 3
  3. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 6
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 7
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 15
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 16
  7. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 21
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 22
  9. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 26
  10. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 28
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 30
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 31
  13. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 33
  14. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 37
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 38
  16. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 40
  17. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 41
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 43
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 44
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 45
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 46
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 47
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 48
  24. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 4
  25. ↑ Chapter 46: New Beginnings, page 8
  26. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 5
  27. ↑ Chapter 39: Love My Way, page 21
  28. ↑ Chapter 38: Rising Temperature, page 6
  29. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 24
  30. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 14
  31. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 9
  32. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 36
  33. ↑ Chapter 35: Under Pressure, page 9
  34. ↑ Chapter 25: Humble Approach, page 3
  35. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 23
  36. ↑ Chapter 46: New Beginnings, page 3
  37. ↑ Chapter 39: Love My Way, page 18
  38. ↑ Chapter 68: December, page 24
  39. ↑ Chapter 69: At Loose Ends, page 20
Retrieved from “https://candypedia.wiki/index.php?title=At_Loose_Ends&oldid=5325”